Ipad Review –hmmm…
With a lot of prodding from my buddy Scott, I broke down and bought a 16gb iPad. Part of the motivation is that we want to port Dark Nova to iPad. Also, I’m going on a trip and the idea of having something really light instead of my MBP 15 was attractive. But mainly I bought it because I wanted to check it out. See the new trend for myself.
The tablet has finally arrived after all these years. How many years? In 1992 I worked for a company that was building tablets for the military. 18 years ago I had one of these systems in my bedroom. The company was GRiD Systems and they had working production tablet computers based on the i486/33 I believe. They ran a tablet version of Windows 3.1. They were neat for the time but still sucked. This time it’s different.
Yes yes… the iPad is just a big iPhone. Now that I have one, I use the iPhone a lot less in the house. But…. I didn’t want to read books on my iPhone. It’s awesome as a pocket sized device but there are things which, simply due to size it’s not well suited for.
Long story short, I believe this will take over for 80% of what we currently use desktops and laptops for. Plus it adds new applications and new opportunities for interaction and creativity that open up entirely new use cases.
PROS:
- A new class of device that makes existing applications more enjoyable and opens up entirely new use cases.
- Beautiful and sexy as we expect from Apple.
- Battery Life is unbelievable. I’ve had it for 3 days using it a lot and it’s still running on the charge that it came with OUT OF THE BOX!
- Books are great. Lot’s of free books in the iBook store from the Gutenberg Project. Currently reading Sherlock Holmes.
CONS
- HEAVY. I’d gladly trade half the battery life for half the weight.
- Awkward to hold, mainly because it’s heavy.
- You’ll want iPad specific apps cause they are way cooler. So you will be buying more, possibly duplicate apps that are also more expensive.